|
September 11 Web Archive Collection This is an archived Web site from the Library of Congress. |
|
||||||||||
| Back to previous page |
http://www.awitness.org/news/september_2001/index.html Archived: Nov 01, 2001 at 14:22:01 |
|||||||||||
| Note: External links, forms and search boxes may not function within this collection |
|
|||||||||||
|
A bright red horse Reaction the events of September 11th News Roundup September 18, 2001 Personal news A delighted Sharon makes hay while the sun shines Unconscious (or conscious?) hypocrisy - Prominent American Dissidents release statements on the tragedy in New York. While there is no denying the grief of those who lost family or friends in New York, looking at the disaster from a non-western perspective one can only wonder if the rest of the world sees hypocrisy in the outpourings of grief.
Bush declares War on Terrorism - A Parody on the New York IndyMedia Site  
Yahweh remembers - some personal news - a description of UFO over Saskatoon at 3 AM, September 4th, 2001 'Fact of the week' from AlterNet: Federal spending on education: $42 billionOffsite link : Food not Bombs tour - looking for places to stay (got some room at your place)? OFFSITE Link : Religious fanatics murder couples in Algeria - this latest mindless act of religious stupidity follows another mass murder in August as well as an attempt to burn another couple at the stake just recently. Such lunatic behavior is a product of mindless adherence to the violence and superstitions inculcated in people through religious texts and is the product of a religious leadership with no integrity or compassion for humanity. See my Bible Commentary pages for some critical examination of these texts...Since there are quite a few pages on this site I thought I would direct your attention to what I feel might be some of the more pointed, most useful links in this section of my site (or read the summary of the Bible Commentary pages on my Site Summary page)... Jeremiah's protest against the Moses myth and Leviticus and the priestly counter reaction that followed. The Bible is not 'inerrant', according to the Bible itself...Time magazine names T.D. Jakes 'America's best preacher'. While Jakes preaches with flair, his ideology of female subjugation does not appear to be original to the church but rather a product of reactionary oppression in later times by Greek Stoic males who formed the canon. OFFSITE Link : Product placement coming to a library near you ... "British author Fay Weldon's latest novel, "The Bulgari Connection," doesn't just happen to have the name of an up-scale jewelry store in its title by chance. The Italian jewerly company paid Weldon an undisclosed amount of money to be prominently featured in her novel." See also : Author writes novel at Jeweler's behest ... "the current crop of "chick lit" novels and memoirs about the lives of young women, offers potential for promoting vodka, cigarets, clothing and other brands ... Letty Pogrebin, president of the Authors Guild, said product placements erode readers' confidence in the authenticity of the narrative. She said it adds to the cynicism ... " BBC : Christianity 'almost vanquished in UK' "Christianity has been "all but eliminated" as a source of moral guidance in people's lives ... The remarks come against a background of a steady decline in attendance at mass and a worsening shortage of priests ... the church was losing about a million members every five years .. " This morning I was watching a few minutes of 'Canada AM' and the poll question of the day was "Should countries pull out of the racism conference because of attempts to critique Zionism as a form of racism?" I was just stunned by how conservative the hosts are on that show, giving a uniform thumbs up to both Zionism and pulling out of the conference (and with such a leading introduction to that poll, I think it easy to imagine how skewed the results of that poll are likely to be). This provoked me, and so I present a brief page on the historical roots of Zionism as my contribution to the debate 'is Zionism a form of racism? A look at the historical roots of Zionism, in their own words...' While the U.N. Conference on racism is underway in South Africa, we ask the question "is the establishment of a state based on racial or ethnic lines a form of racism?" While no one would suggest today that 'an all white state' or 'the establishment of a state 'for only Christians' where everyone else will be removed is an acceptable option in the minds of most people today, in Israel we see the 'Zionist dream' of the estblishment of an 'ethnically pure' state 'only for Jewish people' (on lands seized from other people, by the way) as, for some reason 'okay' (or, as some would have it, even a so called 'divine miracle of God'). The discussion of the exclusionary nature of the Jewish state would seem to be a legitimate point for debate in South Africa, and the extreme sensitivity of both Israel and its sponsor, the United States in even tolerating a discussion of the issue only reveals just how difficult it would be to justify Israel in the sight of the world as the one permissable 'apartheid' state which also occupies 'the moral high ground'. ''Discrimination against non-Jews is grounded in Israeli laws, regulations and practices, which have created a system similar to apartheid in South Africa -- but different from apartheid in that its goal is not to rule over but to remove or expel the indigenous Palestinian population.'' - Arjan El Fassed, Washington PostNoam Chomsky on the middle east - Some commentary on the Middle East in his typical manner ... A few quotes from the article ... "Turkey was of course a strategic ally so it always had a fairly high level of military aid. But the aid shot up in 1984, at the time that the counterinsurgency war began. This had nothing to do with Cold War, transparently. It was because of the counterinsurgency war. The aid remain high, peaking through the 1990s as the atrocities increased. The peak year was 1997. In fact in the single year 1997, US military aid to Turkey was greater than in the entire period of 1950 to 1983 when there were allegedly Cold War issues. The end result was pretty awesome: tens of thousands of people killed, two to three million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing with some 3500 villages destroyed—about seven times Kosovo under NATO bombing ... self-declared advocates of human rights deplore what they call “our failure to protect the Kurds,” and so on. Actually we are “failing to protect the Kurds” roughly in the way that the Russians are “failing to protect the people of Chechnya ... I mentioned that during this period, Turkey became the leading US arms recipient in the world. That’s not quite accurate—the leading recipients are in a separate category. They are Israel and Egypt. They are always the leading recipients. But aside from them, Turkey reached first place during the period of the counterinsurgency war. For a while it was displaced by El Salvador, which was then in the process of slaughtering its own population and moved into the first place. But as they succeeded in that, Turkey took over and became first ... Colombia has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, and for the last ten years, when it’s had the worst human rights record, it received the bulk of the US military aid and training — about half. That’s a correlation the works pretty closely incidentally. Why did Colombia replace Turkey in 1999? Well, we’re not supposed to notice that by 1999 Turkey had succeeded in repressing internal resistance and Colombia hadn’t yet succeeded—and just by accident that happened to be the year in which the huge flow of arms to Colombia increased and displaced Turkey in first place, aside from the two perennials ... All of this is particularly remarkable because of something that you all know: we been inundated in the last two or three years by a flood of self adulation—unprecedented in history to my knowledge—about how we are so magnificent that for the first time in history we are willing to pursue “principles and values” in defense of human rights and especially in crucial cases ... US ambassador Martin Indyk. He said we do not believe in rewarding violence. That was a stern admonition to the Palestinians yesterday, and there are many others like it. And it’s easy to assess the validity of that claim ... (He then goes on to discuss such things as Israel's helicopter gun ship attacks, and ) "the Israeli press announced and then the international press repeated that the US and Israel had reached a deal — the biggest deal in a decade — for dispatch of US military helicopters to Israel...Israel and the United States had just made another deal, a half billion-dollar deal, for advanced Apache attack helicopters...There’s no news office in the country that isn’t perfectly well aware of it. Anyone who can read Amnesty International reports knows about it ... It simply wouldn’t do to publish these reports alongside of the occasional mention of US helicopters attacking civilian targets or carrying out targeted political assassination, and reports of stern US admonitions to all sides to refrain from violence." (the point being that violence can be rewarded, depending on who is being violent) ..." Congressman promises to introduce 'free speech' legislation for religious right For recent news postings on this site visit the July\August section or visit one of the links on the left... |
